I first started this blog due to "popular demand" for me to to share my cooking and quilting results in blog form as it was easier for friends and people who know me to see what I'm up to, especially compared to just an image hosting site. Now I blog because I enjoy sharing what I do and hope that I do in some way inspire people to try new things out as well.

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Monday, 7 October 2013

This time I'm giving you a 3-in-1 TUSAL update as it's been a while since I have taken photo's of my TUSAL jars and put them on my blog. What is a TUSAL? It's a Totally Useless Stitch-A-Long! Check the side bar for a linky to the lovely lady who runs it. Quite a lot has been created lately but not always stitching related and as I only keep the threads from embroideries the jars are not as full as they might be. I am only including photo's of the embroidery things I've worked on, however everything mentioned is on my blog.

July

In July the only thing I embroidered was the raccoon embroidery so the jar is empty aside from the tails of threads and the threads from the kit that I didn't use as they were too short for me to keep.

August

In august I worked a bit on the apple and on the failed mystery project B

September

In September it got a lot done I finished the apple and stitched a complete sewing kit.

Non stitching wise I made an e-reader cover and a cable pouch for the e-reader cable. as well as completing a recycled plastic messenger bag, a crochet plastic basket and a tiny little pouch that is the right size for a few coins or 2 AA sized batteries and a small quilt top.

This was made for the #stitchingpiratesSailing the fruit contest however as the rules say that there must be 2 pieces of fruit this is
not my final entry - I need to add something else before it is eligible.

Well the pieces you see with the apple are the "something else" I added to make it an eligible entry. I first planned to do a 3D strawberry which was originally mystery project B but it turned out to be too stiff to be able to make a strawberry out of it so I knew I had to make something a little bigger. So I then decided to make a tangerine to go with the apple but creating a pattern as I went along making the tangerine (as I just *knew* that people would want to make the tangerine and there was no way I'd be able to make a pattern once I'd completed the piece) was slow and I didn't think I'd be able to finish this on time. So I looked in my pattern scrapbooks to see what I could find that might work.

It all started with the raspberry embroidery which I completed in less than a day but once it was done I didn't know what to do with it and it didn't really seem to suit the apple so I set it aside to think. The pattern I'd found in my scrapbook to make the raspberry also had some other fruit so I decided to move on to the strawberry with the initial plan of using the strawberry next to the cherry as a needle book but the strawberry turned out to be so bit that would have been a little bit too large for the needle book, and the two together would have been bigger than the bit of embroidery fabric I had left. At that point I decided to just do the strawberry and leave the cherry for something else, though I now also didn't know what to do with the strawberry either.

Full of doubt as to what I was doing for this but knowing that even if I skipped the apple completely and just went with the strawberry and raspberry it would not be "enough" I decided to keep going with the embroideries thinking that at worst I'd have a set of fruit that went together as they all came from the same pattern. I looked at the scraps of embroidery fabric I had left that was the same as what was already present in the other embroideries and had a think as to what I could do with them. I still wanted to go with a sewing kit but couldn't see how I could use the strawberry for it. I decided to make a needle book out of the raspberry and considered using the cherry for a pincushion but realised that it would just look odd. I did know that with the round shapes it would look nice on the flap of a scissors case so that's what it became.

The last pattern of the 4 for the fruits was far too big for the fabric I had left as it was a long string of berries but I picked out a couple of the berries and used them. I didn't want to make a square our of it as I had the idea of a single dangling tassle at the bottom so sacrificed 2 of my hexagon papers to make elongated hexagons and using a bit of red fabric as the backing and a scrap of ribbon I had on my desk I made a scissors fob out of it.

By the time I'd finished all these pieces I realised that I could make a box with the strawberry if I lined pieces of cardboard with fabric, so, as I didn't have any fabric glue, I had to do it the old fashioned way: by stretching the fabric over the pieces of cardboard and then carefully sewing a second piece of fabric to the first. The piece you see above is the base which was given a piece of felt as the outer side so I had to stretch the lining first before adding the felt. For all the other pieces I stretched the outer fabric over the card and sewed down the lining. I needed more fabric around the edges of the strawberry than I had so I sewed some strips of red batik to the outside of the embroidery and placed that on 2 pieces of batting (one smaller than the other to make it dome a little) and then stretched it around the cardboard. I then sewed all the pieces together using DMC perle thread and a large needle - it was rather painful sewing this together and by the time I was finished my hands really hurt.

I wanted to be able to fully open my box so didn't sew up the sides of it As you can see I also added 2 little pockets to 2 of the sides. What isn't so visible in these photo's is that the box is covered with read and white fabrics - 2 red and 2 white for the lid and 2 red and 2 white for the box itself - swapping them round so no 2 are next to each other.